Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

AcademicHub aggregates real-time literature from top journals and preprint platforms. Build your personal research radar and let large language models compile cross-disciplinary analysis briefings automatically.

01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

An AI Security Agent for University ACMIS: Multi-Vector Threat Detection and Automated Response

arXiv:2606.08270v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: University Academic Management Information Systems (ACMIS) are high-value targets for a wide spectrum of security threats including brute-force login attacks, payment fraud, privilege escalation, insider data theft, and academic integrity violations. Traditional rule-based intrusion detection systems are inadequate because many malicious activities are structurally indistinguishable from normal operations. This paper presents an AI-based security agent for ACMIS that combines supervised anomaly detection, behavioural analytics, and a natural language processing chatbot for secure password recovery. The agent monitors five operational layers: authentication, authorisation, financial transactions, user behaviour, and system health, and responds through a four-tier risk escalation framework. A modular architecture allows the core engine to be extended to other institutional systems. Experiments on a simulated ACMIS event log dataset of 147,922 sessions demonstrate a threat detection macro-average F1 of 0.966, compared to 0.156 for a rule-based baseline and 0.836 for a sequence-only (LSTM) baseline, with end-to-end critical-tier automated response latency under 1 ms on a single-node prototype. The integrated recovery chatbot achieves 97.1 percent identity verification accuracy and an 87.3 percent mass-reset attack detection rate with zero false positives on legitimate high volume recovery periods.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Measurement incompatibility and quantum steering via linear programming

arXiv:2506.03045v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The problem of deciding whether a set of quantum measurements is jointly measurable is known to be equivalent to determining whether a quantum assemblage is unsteerable. This problem can be formulated as a semidefinite program (SDP). However, the number of variables and constraints in such a formulation grows exponentially with the number of measurements, rendering it intractable for large measurement sets. In this work, we circumvent this problem by transforming the SDP into a hierarchy of linear programs that compute upper and lower bounds on the incompatibility robustness with a complexity that grows polynomially in the number of measurements. The hierarchy is guaranteed to converge and it can be applied to arbitrary measurements – including non-projective POVMs (Positive Operator-Valued Measures) – in arbitrary dimensions. While convergence becomes impractical in high dimensions, in the case of qubits our method reliably provides accurate upper and lower bounds for the incompatibility robustness of sets with several hundred measurements in a short time using a standard laptop. We also apply our methods to qutrits, obtaining non-trivial upper and lower bounds in scenarios that are otherwise intractable using the standard SDP approach, although such bounds are significantly looser than the ones obtained in the qubit case. Finally, we show how our methods can be used to construct local hidden state models for states (i.e., to prove that a state cannot lead to steering under any possible local measurements), or conversely, to certify that a given state exhibits steering; for two-qubit quantum states, our approach is comparable to, and in some cases outperforms, the current best methods.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Learning aligned EEG representations with subject-specific encoders

arXiv:2606.16462v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cross-subject EEG decoding promises more training data, but it also exposes neural networks to strong inter-subject distribution shifts. We study whether task supervision and architecture alone can learn subject-aligned representations. We replace a shared EEG encoder with subject-specific encoders followed by a common classifier, and compare this hybrid model with standard EEGNet, AttentionBaseNet, and CTNet baselines with Euclidean Alignment (EA) on four motor-imagery datasets. EA improves shared encoders by recentering subject covariances, but the hybrid encoder largely internalises this role: validation-loss curves and latent-distance analyses change little when EA is removed. Subject-specific heads increase class distinctiveness and place each subject close to its own latent manifold, improving most subjects while leaving a method-sensitive subset. These results support subject-specific encoders as a learned alignment mechanism for EEG decoding and identify head selection for unseen subjects as the remaining bottleneck.

04.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Human migration has surged since 2000 — these maps reveal where people are going

Authors:

Modelling with artificial-intelligence tools has filled gaps in migration data, revealing detailed global population movements from 1990 to 2023. Modelling with artificial-intelligence tools has filled gaps in migration data, revealing detailed global population movements from 1990 to 2023.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

A Generalizable Light Transport 3D Embedding for Global Illumination

Global illumination (GI) is essential for realistic rendering but remains computationally expensive due to the complexity of simulating indirect light transport. Recent neural methods have mainly relied on per-scene optimization, sometimes extended to handle changes in camera or geometry. Efforts toward cross-scene generalization have largely stayed in 2D screen space, such as neural denoising or G-buffer based GI prediction, which often suffer from view inconsistency and limited spatial understanding. We propose a generalizable 3D light transport embedding that approximates global illumination directly from 3D scene configurations, without using rasterized or path-traced cues. Each scene is represented as a point cloud with geometric and material features. A scalable transformer models global point-to-point interactions to encode these features into neural primitives. At render time, each query point retrieves nearby primitives via nearest-neighbor search and aggregates their latent features through cross-attention to predict the desired rendering quantity. We demonstrate results on diffuse global illumination prediction across diverse indoor scenes with varying layouts, geometry, and materials. The embedding trained for irradiance estimation can be quickly adapted to new rendering tasks with limited fine-tuning. We also present preliminary results for spatial-directional radiance field estimation for glossy materials and show how the normalized field can accelerate unbiased path guiding. This approach highlights a path toward integrating learned priors into rendering pipelines without explicit ray-traced illumination cues.

06.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Beyond MACs: Hardware Efficient Architecture Design for Vision Backbones

Vision backbone networks play a central role in modern computer vision. Enhancing their efficiency directly benefits a wide range of downstream applications. To measure efficiency, many publications rely on MACs (Multiply Accumulate operations) as a predictor of execution time. In this paper, we experimentally demonstrate the shortcomings of such a metric, especially in the context of edge devices. By contrasting the MAC count and execution time of common architectural design elements, we identify key factors for efficient execution and provide insights to optimize backbone design. Based on these insights, we present LowFormer, a novel vision backbone family. LowFormer features a streamlined macro and micro design that includes Lowtention, a lightweight alternative to Multi-Head Self-Attention. Lowtention not only proves more efficient, but also enables superior results on ImageNet. Additionally, we present an edge GPU version of LowFormer, that can further improve upon its baseline's speed on edge GPU and desktop GPU. We demonstrate LowFormer's wide applicability by evaluating it on smaller image classification datasets, as well as adapting it to several downstream tasks, such as object detection, semantic segmentation, image retrieval, and visual object tracking. LowFormer models consistently achieve remarkable speed-ups across various hardware platforms compared to recent state-of-the-art backbones. Code and models are available at https://github.com/altair199797/LowFormer/blob/main/Beyond_MACs.md.

07.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-13

ADMETron: An AI-driven SaaS platform for comprehensive ADMET prediction and compound prioritisation

ONTOSIGHT(R) ADMETron is an AI-driven platform designed for rapid prediction and visualization of Absorption, Distribution, Metabolism, Excretion, and Toxicity (ADMET) properties to support modern drug discovery. The platform integrates an interactive web interface with a scalable predictive engine, enabling high-throughput virtual screening and batch analysis of chemical compounds. Its core architecture combines recurrent neural network (RNN)-derived molecular embeddings from SMILES representations with physicochemical descriptors, which are subsequently modeled using gradient boosting machines (GBMs). This framework provides predictions across 34 ADMET endpoints, including physicochemical properties, absorption, CYP450 interactions, hERG liability, and mutagenicity. The predictive performance of ADMETron was evaluated using benchmark datasets from the Therapeutics Data Commons (TDC), demonstrating strong performance and generalizability across both classification and regression tasks. Beyond predictive modeling, the platform introduces an interactive radar graph-based structure-activity relationship (SAR) visualization framework that enables real-time comparison of multiple compounds and reference drugs across selected ADMET parameters. This feature facilitates intuitive interpretation of multidimensional molecular profiles and supports lead optimization and compound prioritization. Comparative assessment against widely used online ADMET tools further demonstrated broad endpoint coverage spanning pharmacokinetic, physicochemical, toxicity, and medicinal chemistry properties within a unified environment. Together, these capabilities establish ADMETron as a comprehensive platform for ADMET assessment and data-driven decision-making in drug discovery. (https://admetron.partex.ai/).

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

SIMBA: ABidirectional Retrieval Forward Simulation Framework for Modeling FY-4A GIIRS Hyperspectral Infrared Radiances Toward NWP Applications

arXiv:2606.19943v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hyperspectral infrared observations are an important data source for numerical weather prediction (NWP) because they provide rich information on the vertical structure of atmospheric temperature and humidity. However, most existing deep learning methods mainly focus on one-way retrieval from radiances to atmospheric profiles, while the reverse radiance simulation process and the consistency between atmospheric state space and radiance observation space are insufficiently considered. In this study, we propose SIMBA, a unified bidirectional retrieval-forward simulation framework for FY-4A GIIRS hyperspectral infrared radiance modeling toward NWP applications. The framework jointly performs atmospheric profile retrieval and radiance reconstruction, introduces a cycle-consistency constraint to strengthen the coupling between the two processes, and employs a bidirectional Mamba state-space module to capture long-range dependencies along pressure levels. Using collocated FY-4A GIIRS observations and ERA5 reanalysis data, the proposed method is evaluated for temperature retrieval, specific humidity retrieval, long-wave radiance reconstruction, and medium-wave radiance reconstruction. Experimental results show that SIMBA outperforms several representative deep learning baselines across both retrieval and reconstruction tasks, while ablation experiments confirm the contribution of the bidirectional design and cycle-consistency mechanism. These results demonstrate that the proposed framework is effective for joint atmospheric profile retrieval and hyperspectral infrared radiance modeling, and suggest potential for future Jacobian-related analysis and NWP-oriented extensions.

09.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-19

Cardiometabolic multimorbidity and care experiences in primary healthcare among Brazilian adults aged 50 and over (ELSI-Brazil)

Background: Population aging and the rising burden of non-communicable diseases have increased the prevalence of cardiometabolic multimorbidity (CM-MM) among older adults. Patient-reported experience measures (PREMs) are recognized as essential components of healthcare quality assessment, yet evidence on primary care experiences among individuals with CM-MM remains scarce. Objective: To analyze primary care experiences according to the presence of cardiometabolic multimorbidity among Brazilians aged 50 years and older. Methods: Cross-sectional study using data from the second wave of the Brazilian Longitudinal Study of Aging (ELSI-Brazil, 2019-2021; n = 9,949). CM-MM was defined as the self-reported coexistence of two or more of the following conditions: hypertension, diabetes mellitus, dyslipidemia, acute myocardial infarction, and stroke. Primary care experiences were assessed using a validated 12-item instrument organized into four domains: first-contact access, longitudinality, communication, and care coordination. Associations were estimated using Poisson regression adjusted for sociodemographic, health conditions, and healthcare utilization variables, with stratified analysis by Family Health Strategy (FHS) coverage. Results: CM-MM prevalence was 25.5%, with a progressive increase by age and an inverse gradient by education. Individuals with CM-MM reported significantly more positive experiences in longitudinality (mean index 2.53 vs. 2.34; adjusted PR = 1.22; 95%CI 1.12-1.33; p < 0.001) and, to a lesser extent, in communication (mean index 2.68 vs. 2.58; adjusted PR = 1.10; 95%CI 1.00-1.20; p = 0.041). No statistically significant differences were found in first-contact access or care coordination. After stratified by FHS coverage, the observed differences in longitudinality and communication were no longer statistically significant. Conclusions: CM-MM was associated with more positive primary care experiences in longitudinality and communication. The absence of differentiated experiences in first-contact access and coordination highlights structural gaps in primary care responsiveness to individuals with greater clinical complexity. Keywords: Multimorbidity; Cardiometabolic diseases; Primary Care; Patient-reported experience measures; Older adults; ELSI-Brazil.

10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Excess mortality in Germany during 2020-2023: A descriptive age-stratified analysis

Authors:

This study investigates excess mortality in Germany in the years from 2020 to 2023 and its temporal alignment with reported COVID-19 deaths. The analysis uses annual and weekly all-cause mortality data and linear baseline trends derived from pre-pandemic years. Possible effects of demographic and population changes on baseline trends were also examined. Excess mortality was analysed over time and across age groups. Excess mortality was observed in all investigated years, rising from 2020 to its highest value in 2022. In absolute terms, the age group [&ge;]80 years accounted for the largest proportion of excess deaths throughout the study period. After 2021, elevated mortality relative to baseline was also observed in younger age groups down to 15 years of age, although absolute numbers remained substantially lower than in older groups. No evidence of excess mortality was observed for individuals younger than 15 years. Periods of excess mortality were temporally aligned with waves of reported COVID-19 deaths. In 2020, cumulative excess mortality after calendar week 11 closely matched reported COVID-19 deaths (43 876 vs. 41 835 deaths). Weekly excess mortality, reported COVID-19 deaths and wastewater viral load, when available showed strong temporal synchrony, although excess mortality increasingly exceeded reported COVID-19 deaths during later pandemic waves. Temporal patterns differed from the typical seasonal mortality peaks commonly associated with influenza epidemics during the early months of the year. In 2023, excess mortality declined substantially, possibly indicating a return to mortality levels before the emergence of SARS-CoV-2.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

ReCal: Reward Calibration for RL-based LLM Routing

arXiv:2606.12479v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) routing has emerged as an effective paradigm for leveraging the complementary strengths of multiple LLMs through dynamic model and reasoning-strategy selection. Recent reinforcement learning (RL)-based routing methods further improve routing quality by optimizing routing policies from interaction feedback. However, they still struggle to provide informative and comparable learning signals under heterogeneous tasks with varying difficulty. In practice, multiple objectives (e.g., correctness, format behavior) are aggregated into a single scalar reward, leading to ambiguous credit assignment and conflicting optimization signals. Moreover, reward signals exhibit significant variability across instances, where some instances produce higher or more variable rewards, introducing optimization bias that favors trivial samples over informative ones. To address these issues, we propose ReCal, a \underline{Re}ward \underline{Cal}ibration framework for RL-based LLM routing. We first introduce a hierarchical reward decomposition mechanism with component-wise advantage estimation. We further propose a distribution-aware optimization strategy that calibrates optimization variability through variance-aware reweighting and per-dataset normalization. Experiments on seven datasets demonstrate that ReCal consistently improves routing performance, and training stability over baselines. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ReCal.

12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Top-Theta Attention: Sparsifying Transformers by Compensated Thresholding

We present Top-Theta (Top-$\theta$) Attention, a training-free method for sparsifying transformer attention during inference. Our key insight is that static, per-head thresholds can be calibrated to retain the desired constant number of significant elements per attention row. This approach enables content-based sparsity without retraining, and it remains robust across data domains. We further introduce compensation techniques to preserve accuracy under aggressive sparsification, establishing attention thresholding as a practical and principled alternative to top-k attention. We provide extensive evaluation on natural language processing tasks, showing that Top-$\theta$ achieves 3-10x reduction in V-cache usage and up to 10x fewer attention elements during inference while degrading no more than 1% in accuracy.

13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Room-Specialized Mixture-of-Experts for In-Home ADL Recognition with Ambient Sensors

Monitoring activities of daily living (ADLs) in the home is a promising approach for tracking dementia progression in older adults. While ambient sensor-based ADL systems are well-studied, most existing ADL recognition systems rely on globally trained models that ignore the spatial organization of in-home activities. In real deployments, where training data are sparse and highly home-specific, global transformer models may fail to capture room-dependent behavioral structure. We propose a deterministic Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture for in-home ADL recognition, in which each expert is a compact transformer specialized to one room of the home (bedroom, kitchen, bathroom, living area). Input segments are routed using a deterministic gating strategy based on room-level motion activity and time-of-day priors for sleep-related behaviors. Unlike learned routing networks, the proposed gate encodes domain knowledge about where ADLs are likely to occur, reducing model complexity under limited per-home training data. By decomposing ADL recognition into room-specific activity spaces, the proposed architecture reduces competition between dominant and low-frequency activities under highly imbalanced residential data. We evaluated the system on data collected via low-cost ambient sensors (motion, light, temperature, humidity) and Raspberry Pi edge devices across five homes, with ground-truth ADL labels provided by participants and caregivers. Across the five homes, the proposed MoE consistently outperformed global transformer, 1D CNN, and Random Forest baselines, achieving macro-F1 scores ranging from 0.60 to 0.88, highlighting the importance of home-specific modeling in real-world deployments. These findings suggest that room-aware expert specialization may provide a practical and interpretable strategy for low-data ADL recognition in real-world residential environments.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Beyond Scalar Scores: Exploring LLM-based Metrics for Clinical Significance Evaluation in Radiology Reports

Reliable evaluation of generated radiology reports requires strict clinical accuracy, as omitted critical findings or mischaracterized radiographic observations can directly affect patient care. Existing metrics obscure this requirement by reducing report quality to a medically ungrounded scalar. Although Large Language Models (LLMs) possess rich medical knowledge, they likewise struggle to draw a reliable boundary between clinically significant errors and harmless variation. We study this boundary using ReEvalMed benchmark as testbed and evaluate metric-level clinical significance from detecting true clinical errors ("Discrimination") and tolerating insignificant variations ("Robustness"). Across 8 LLM evaluators under one-pass and two-pass settings, we identify a widespread discrimination bias: models effectively detect errors but also over-penalize harmless rephrasings. To mitigate this, we synthesize 4k report pairs and train lightweight interpretable metrics on Qwen3-8B and MedGemma-4B. Our trained metric sharpens the clinical significance boundary, surpassing 32B-scale medical LLMs and remaining competitive with proprietary models. Crucially, the more costly two-pass setting fails to consistently improve overall performance and mainly trades discrimination for robustness. These findings suggest one-pass trained metrics as the practical choice for cost-sensitive deployment, with two-pass inference reserved for settings where D-R balance is critical. We will release the dataset and metric.

15.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

Revealing trajectories of multi-modal voxel-level changes in neurodegenerative diseases using latent event mapping

Neurodegenerative diseases are driven by pathological mechanisms that can be indirectly measured in vivo using multi-modal neuroimaging. However, current computational methods that aim to reconstruct trajectories of voxel-level changes in the brain are either not computationally scalable or fully interpretable, limiting their ability to reveal associations between disease progression and underlying mechanisms. Here we introduce Latent Event Mapping (LEMING), a generative unsupervised modelling technique that learns a latent map of disease events along a common pseudo-timeline of events. We apply LEMING to amyloid PET and structural MRI data from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative to reveal the first voxel-level trajectories of events in Alzheimer's disease. Notably, we show how LEMING can provide new insights into progression-dependent disease mechanisms. We find that acetylcholine receptor density is significantly positively associated with both late-stage amyloid and atrophy events, suggesting that either these receptors are targeted later in disease progression, or that amyloid does not play an active role. This has strong implications for therapeutics that target acetylcholine receptors, particularly for early-stage intervention strategies.

16.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

High-Fidelity Two-Step Image Generation via Teacher-Aligned End-to-End Distillation

Few-step diffusion distillation has become increasingly mature for 4-8-step generation, yet pushing further to 2 steps remains challenging. In this work, we introduce Z-Image Turbo++, a high-quality 2-step image generation model distilled from the 8-step Z-Image Turbo teacher. Our method addresses the central bottlenecks of increased task difficulty and limited model capacity in 2-step generation through three simple but effective design choices tailored to this regime. First, we propose Distribution-Aligned Adversarial Learning, which uses teacher-generated images rather than external real images as real samples for GAN training, providing a more attainable and informative adversarial target. Second, we adopt Step-Decoupled Parameterization, assigning independent model parameters to the two denoising steps to better match their distinct capacity demands. Third, we perform End-to-End Training with Iterative Regularization, allowing the first step to receive gradients from final image quality while preserving a meaningful intermediate generation through an explicit step-1 loss. Together, these designs substantially narrow the quality gap between 2-step and 8-step generation in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations, highlighting the potential of carefully tailored distillation strategies for improving the quality-efficiency trade-off in few-step generation.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

BCL: Bayesian In-Context Learning Framework for Information Extraction

Existing information extraction (IE) tasks increasingly adopt in-context learning (ICL) with large language models. However, current approaches either show inconsistent performance across model scales or lack systematic optimization and generalizability. Building on this, we propose BCL (Bayesian In-Context Learning Framework for Information Extraction), the first optimization framework that uses particle filtering with Bayesian updates to systematically refine label representations across IE tasks. Through four steps initialization, observation, weight update, and resampling, BCL generalizes to both sequence labeling and relation classification paradigms. Extensive experiments demonstrate substantial and consistent improvements over existing approaches.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

A Collective-Spin Derivation of the Uniform Magnon Hamiltonian in Cavity Magnonics

arXiv:2606.13830v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present a direct collective-spin derivation of the effective uniform-mode Hamiltonian used in cavity magnonics. Starting from a nearest-neighbor Heisenberg ferromagnet coupled to long-wavelength magnetic fields, we show that the relevant dynamics can be restricted to the fully symmetric spin sector, where the exchange interaction contributes only a constant energy shift and the ferromagnet behaves as a macrospin of length $Ns$. Applying the Holstein–Primakoff transformation directly to this total spin yields the usual uniform magnon mode and its leading nonlinear corrections without first introducing site-resolved bosonic operators. This collective formulation makes explicit the interpretation of the ferromagnet as a synthetic large-spin atom and provides a compact route to the effective Hamiltonians used in driven and Floquet cavity magnonics. As a physical consequence, the leading nonlinear correction produces an occupation-dependent reduction of the effective magnon–photon coupling, providing a simple signature of finite-spin saturation under strong uniform-mode driving.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Making Models Unmergeable via Scaling-Sensitive Loss Landscape

arXiv:2601.21898v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The rise of model hubs has made it easier to access reusable model components, making model merging a practical tool for combining capabilities. Yet, this modularity also creates a governance gap: downstream users can recompose released weights into unauthorized mixtures that bypass safety alignment or licensing terms. Because existing defenses are largely post-hoc and architecture-specific, they provide inconsistent protection across diverse architectures and release formats in practice. To close this gap, we propose Trap$^2$, an architecture-agnostic protection framework that encodes protection into updates during fine-tuning, regardless of whether they are released as adapters or full models. Instead of relying on architecture-dependent approaches, Trap$^2$ uses weight re-scaling as a simple proxy for the merging process. It keeps released weights effective in standalone use, but degrades them under re-scaling that often arises in merging, undermining unauthorized recomposition.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Seed-Guided Semi-Supervised Clustering by A-Contrario Anomaly Detection

arXiv:2606.18833v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper introduces a semi-supervised clustering framework grounded in the statistical duality between grouping principles and anomaly detection. We address the challenge of robust cluster definition in noisy environments – a task where partitioning algorithms often over-assign outliers and density-based methods remain sensitive to heuristic global parameters. Drawing on a-contrario statistical reasoning and Gestalt proximity principles, we define a cluster as a maximal subset of data points containing no anomalies relative to a null hypothesis of uniform randomness. Central to this approach is the Perception algorithm, which utilises a principled expectation-based threshold ($\mathbb{E} < 1$) to identify outliers without manual parameter tuning. By treating clustering as the dual of anomaly detection, we employ an iterative ``clustering-by-exclusion'' mechanism. The algorithm is seed-guided, leveraging minimal user-provided labels to initialise robust cluster medians and form initial groups, which are subsequently expanded by admitting non-anomalous points. This approach naturally isolates fringe points, isolated noise, and emerging unknown clusters. We evaluate the method on synthetic and real-world benchmarks, including image and text datasets represented through raw, linear-reduced, and neighbourhood-preserving embeddings. Results demonstrate that with as few as 10–30 seeds per cluster, the proposed method achieves competitive and often very strong performance under a practical low-tuning benchmarking protocol, while maintaining linear scalability with respect to both observations and dimensionality for a fixed number of seeded clusters and iterations.

21.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

The Amazon can be saved — with concerted action inside and outside Brazil

Authors: Unknown Author

As deforestation in the Amazon falls, fresh evidence shows that the rainforest can withstand global warming, but only if there is a worldwide effort to stop cutting it down. As deforestation in the Amazon falls, fresh evidence shows that the rainforest can withstand global warming, but only if there is a worldwide effort to stop cutting it down.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Foresight: Iterative Reasoning About Clues that Matter for Navigation

arXiv:2606.12550v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Open-world mapless navigation from sparse language instructions requires resolving underspecified goals and inferring which environmental cues are relevant for reaching the goal. For instance, reaching an out-of-view destination may require interpreting ramps, signs, or detours that reveal where to go or which route to take. Prior works are limited by their reliance on known navigation factors and closed-set factor categories, or identify cues before motion planning and miss plan-dependent cues. We argue that pretrained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) can discover novel instruction-relevant cues, but require adaptation to focus on which cues matter and how they should influence motion planning. We realize these ideas in Foresight, a test-time framework in which a finetuned VLM alternates between proposing image-space motion plans and critiquing them using the language goal and visual context. Subsequent plans are conditioned on prior critiques, enabling iterative motion refinement before execution. To align plan critiques and refinements with open-set behavior preferences, we learn a reward model from human feedback and use it to post-train the VLM with reinforcement learning in the plan-critique loop. In offline evaluations and 6 real-world environments, Foresight improves average task success by 37% and reduces interventions per mission by 52% relative to state-of-the-art test-time reasoning and foundation-model baselines, while running in real-time on a Jetson AGX Orin. We will release code, data, and training details to support future work on test-time reasoning for robot motion refinement. Additional videos at: https://amrl.cs.utexas.edu/foresight

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Small LLMs for Biomedical Claim Verification: Cost-Effective Fine-Tuning, Structural Dataset Shortcuts, and Cross-Domain Generalization

Authors:

Large Language Models such as GPT-4o and GPT-5 achieve strong zero-shot performance on biomedical claim verification, but cost and opacity limit scalable use. We fine-tune three small LLMs: Phi-3-mini (3.8B), Qwen2.5-3B, and Mistral-7B, via QLoRA on SciFact and HealthVer, providing the first study of QLoRA models against GPT-4o and fine-tuned BioLinkBERT encoders. Mistral-7B QLoRA surpasses both GPT-4o and GPT-5 (up to 12% F1 gain) at a fractional cost using just 1,008 training examples. We conduct extensive in-domain and cross-domain evaluation: models trained on SciFact tested on HealthVer and vice versa, at matched sizes to isolate dataset structure from data quantity. We identify a previously unreported structural artifact in SciFact that inflates in-domain scores, and show through bidirectional out-of-domain evaluation that training on structurally sound data enables robust cross-domain transfer. We plan to release all code and adapter checkpoints.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Memento: Reconstruct to Remember for Consistent Long Video Generation

Long-form video generation requires recurring subjects to remain consistent across various shots, viewpoints, motions, and scene transitions. Existing temporal decomposition methods improve scalability by generating videos shot by shot. However, they mainly focus on optimizing plausible next-shot continuations without verifying whether the historical memory preserves identity-critical subject evidence. Consequently, as generation proceeds, recurring subjects may be diluted, overwritten, or forgotten. In this paper, we propose Memento, a subject-reconstruction-guided framework that treats subject preservation as an explicit identity grounding problem, based on the premise that a memory bank faithfully preserving a subject should support reconstructing that subject from memory alone. Specifically, Memento jointly trains autoregressive next-shot generation with memory-based subject reconstruction, recovering target appearances using historical memory and global story captions. To disentangle long-range subject evidence from short-range cues, Memento introduces a dual-query memory mechanism, where one query retrieves identity-relevant memory and the other selects short-context keyframes for coherent continuation. Additionally, a subject-aware cinematic data pipeline provides precise reconstruction supervision via consistent, pronoun-free subject descriptions. Experiments demonstrate that Memento achieves state-of-the-art performance in long-term subject consistency, cross-shot coherence, and visual quality.

25.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-20

Systematic Evaluation of Feature Representations for Cancer-Associated sORF Prediction in Non-coding RNA

Short open reading frames (sORFs) within non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) have arisen as a hidden layer of gene regulation, encoding small peptides that represent a new class of cancer regulators with diagnostic and therapeutic potential. However, inferring associations between sORFs to specific cancer types remains challenging and requires computational approaches for accurate prediction. Recently, the CoraL framework introduced the first computational approach for predicting cancer-associated peptides, focusing primarily on model architecture while overlooking how feature extraction strategies influence predictive accuracy. We present a systematic evaluation of machine learning models and feature extraction approaches to predict cancer-associated sORFs across 15 cancer types. We benchmarked seven traditional machine learning algorithms combined with three feature extraction methods: k-mer frequency, Word2Vec embeddings, and genomic language model (gLM)-based embeddings. To our knowledge, this is the first study applying gLM-derived embeddings to the prediction of cancer-associated sORFs in ncRNA. Our results show that traditional machine learning models with appropriate feature extraction outperform the CoraL baseline across all cancer types, achieving up to 10% higher accuracy in some of the 15 evaluated datasets. Interestingly, k-mer features consistently outperformed gLM embeddings without fine-tuning, suggesting that local sequence composition may provide more discriminative information for this task and that pre-trained genomic representations may require task-specific adaptation to fully capture these patterns. Additionally, we observed that the way sequences are tokenized, such as the k-mer length, can affect performance: longer fragments (e.g., k=7) sometimes reduced accuracy for Random Forest but had a smaller effect on MLP. Our findings suggest that appropriate feature engineering can provide greater improvements than increasing model complexity.